Category: Subverting Empire

Pay Close Attention

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An urgent message from Rev. Dr. Edgar Rivera-Colon. Re-posted from social media.

I would pay close attention to this transparent warning to all progressive and left forces that the Trump regime published as a press release yesterday. I assume further arrests and violent repression in the run up to the midterms and more intensely during the national elections.

The US imperial state knows that the best way to neutralize justice movements is to entangle them in legal defense for political prisoners. A word to the wise should be sufficient.

The quote below is by Stephen Miller:

“One of the hallmarks of left-wing violence and terrorism is its completely pre-textual and disingenuous appeal to civil liberties in an effort to shield its own violence… When the leftist — who does not believe in freedom, who does not believe in civil rights, who does not believe in any ordinary notion of justice — protests that we are violating his rights, understand the he is lying to try to persuade people who are not closely following the political scene that some injustice has perpetrated against him. We must stay the course and be completely unflinching in the pursuit of justice against these enemies of civilization.”

One of its Founding Habits

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This is what journalist and professor Dr. Stacey Patton wrote on the Fourth of July.

I was curious to see what Heather Cox Richardson would write about today.

Not surprisingly, she is doing the classic liberal historian move, which is trying to rescue America’s founding by treating slavery, Indigenous dispossession, and women’s exclusion as tragic “contradictions” rather than constitutive features of the American project.

Look at this phrase she uses in her piece: “the sticky little problem of Black and Indigenous enslavement”

Sticky little problem? Seriously?

Slavery was not a “sticky little problem.” It was THEEEE economic, political, legal, and psychic foundation of the country these men were building. You can’t sit there and call the Declaration of Independence “astonishingly radical” while treating the exclusion of most human beings as some damn parenthetical inconvenience.

Basically, her big argument in this piece is that America was founded on equality, betrayed by reactionaries, redeemed by civil rights struggle, and now its all being threatened again. She’s saying, yes, the Founders had blind spots, but the idea was radical. Yes, America excluded people, but eventually Americans expanded the promise. Yes, we are in danger now, but we can return to our better angels.

Listen, America was not merely founded on “the radical idea that all men are created equal.” America was founded on a RACIALIZED EXCEPTION CLAUSE hiding inside that sentence. The men who wrote “all men” did not accidentally forget Black people, Native people, women, the enslaved, the colonized, the poor, or the propertyless. They built a political order where equality could be proclaimed precisely because inequality had already been naturalized. Let’s start there ffs!

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The Counter-Revolution of 1776

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By Dr. Charisse Burden-Stelly, aka “Dr. CBS,” re-posted from her Substack newsletter. This month, in the lead-up to the celebration of 250 years of “independence,” Dr. CBS has been posting excerpts from a revolutionary thinker from the Black radical tradition every single day. She calls it the “This is America” project.

We must be clear about the difference between radicalism and reaction, revolution and counterrevolution. Let’s talk about it.

I’m Dr. CBS and we have just three days left of of my “This is America” project!

Today we’re thinking with the people’s historian Dr. Gerald Horne’s and his magisterial work, The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of United States of America, published in 2014.

Let’s start with our bar”:

Defenders of the so-called Confederate States of America were far from bonkers when they argued passionately that their revolt was consistent with the animating and driving spirit of 1776. Slavery fueled a rising capitalism. However, ironically, breaking the bonds of slavery was necessary if capitalism was to realize its full potential, not least since enslaved Africans were fiercely determined to destroy the wealth they were creating, along with the lords of the lash. Contradictorily, slavery was both a boost for nascent capitalism and ultimately a fetter on its productive force. More than this, chattel slavery grounded in racist chauvinism—of a uniquely republican and toxic type—was one of the more profound human rights violations of the previous millennium. To the extent that 1776 gave such slavery a renewed lease on life, it was truly a lineal ancestor of 1861 and, thus, a counter-revolution of slavery.”

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Offering Cultures, Sacrifice Cultures, and Us: Behind the Abraham and Isaac Story: Gen 22:1-19

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By Jim Perkinson (above), a sermon preached at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Detroit last weekend. Click here to check out (and suscribe to!) Dr. Perkinson’s new Substack newsletter.

I’ll begin retrospectively.  A month ago, we had a lectionary passage from Genesis about humans being given “dominion” over the animals and plants of the planet.  Four days before that I had just gotten back from leading a bible study at Kirkridge Retreat Center in eastern Pennsylvania, 544 miles one way by car from Detroit.  And I could not help instantly relating the two things—the scripture passage and my “passage” to and from Kirkridge.  As I had driven east on I-80 to get there, I counted the number of deer, lying in grotesque postures, killed by autos careening across the landscape.  I stopped at 26.  That is our dominion over deer. 

And with every one of them that I passed at 78 miles per hour—staying just under the speed at which I know police would pull me over in a 70-mile-per-hour zone—I loathed my behavior.  If I really lived what I believe, I would not dare pass by such a supine body without stopping and at least burying the departed one with appropriate ritual, if not more respectfully skinning the body, gathering the bones, preserving the back strap and ligaments, removing the horns—making sure every feature of that magnificent creature was being honored and lived up to in gratitude for its unwilling gift.  Instead, I held myself responsible to cry out to each and every one I passed—as well as all the smaller-sized little ones also lying by the side of the road—“I’m so sorry, I lament my kind doing this, please go over to the Other Side, be healed, find peace!”  And in every instance, I would find tears flushing my eyes and often dribbling down my cheek. 

And then after the Kirkridge time, I came back to a Motor City in full levity, celebrating the Grand Prix auto fest.  We use the French pronunciation to give it seeming status, but I would rather pronounce the “x” in “Prix” as an English “x.” Pricks”!  Yes, celebrating the Grand Pricks, the Big Dicks, the high-tech MFs plundering the planet for ever greater speed, going . . . around in circles (the planet is round after all)!  Even when we are already energy-strapped and facing fuel crises!  What could be more indicative of our insanity!

I don’t believe in dominion.  But I live it.  I drove to church today.  I lament much of what I do every day—but I don’t stop doing it. I am part of the plundering and killing of the planet. 

Continue reading “Offering Cultures, Sacrifice Cultures, and Us: Behind the Abraham and Isaac Story: Gen 22:1-19” →

The Madness of Grace in a Fallen World

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A new online course offering from The Alternative Seminary. Tuesday evenings, July 7-28 (7:00 – 9:00 p.m).

The Southern writer Flannery O’Connor once offered a wry variation on a theme of Jesus: “You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you odd.”  Her fiction, set in her rural Southern culture, is a world of oddness, weirdness, madness, misfits and murderers, corrupt preachers and moralistic hypocrites.  It is also a world of the sometimes harsh and shocking intrusions of grace into flawed and fractured humanity.

The Alternative Seminary is offering an opportunity to explore O’Connor’s fiction in an upcoming online course.  For four weeks, we will read and discuss some of her most challenging stories. We will pay particular attention to what she might be saying to us in these strange and troubling times – which includes wrestling with her complex views and fictional portrayals of race.  Join us for some provocative (and fun) literary and theological adventures.

The course will be led by Will O’Brien, coordinator of the Alternative Seminary.  The cost for this course is $50 (or whatever you can afford).  To register, go to https://bit.ly/FlanneryOConnor26

For more information contact Will O’Brien at willobrien59@gmail.com or 267-339-8989.

The Alternative Seminary is an informal program of biblical and theological study and reflection designed to foster an authentic biblical witness in the modern world. www.alternativeseminary.net

Always Conditional

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From Nerdeen Kiswani, a Palestinian Muslim and founder of Within Our Lifetime. Re-posted from social media.

The U.S. left really does not understand the damage it is doing to the Palestinian liberation struggle.

No serious Palestinian engaged in the struggle for liberation, whether in Palestine or in exile, would ever condemn or denounce the right of Palestinians to resist occupation, apartheid, and genocide by any means necessary.

Yet we are increasingly told that people who do exactly that are part of the movement, and that anyone who challenges them is divisive, unreasonable, or an “op.”

What this actually does is place Palestinians who remain committed to our political principles in the crosshairs of everyone: Zionists, the right wing, the state, and now even sectors of the left. It marginalizes Palestinians, portrays us as extremists for upholding positions that have always been central to our national liberation struggle, and pressures us to abandon our own political consensus in order to accommodate American political sensibilities.

The result is the isolation of Palestinians from our own movement.

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Interfaith Action for Palestine

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The Interfaith Action for Palestine (IAP) is bringing together a coalition of faith-rooted activist organizations for a critical intervention this summer: we’re coming together to counter Christians United for Israel (CUFI) — the largest “pro-Israel” organization in the United States — during their Annual Summit July 5-7, 2026. For more information and to register, click here.

post-evangelical

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By Tommy Airey, re-posted from his Substack newsletter.

Charles Cha and I joke that we were evangelical Christians before it was cool.

In the early 90’s, we attended a bible study for high school students sponsored by Campus Crusade for Christ. It was basically a training camp for evangelizing students, teachers, administrators and coaches at our public-school campus in Orange County, California.

During our junior year, Charles and I invited friends to join us in Mr. Leander’s classroom during lunch so we could get them saved. We utilized a tract called “The Four Spiritual Laws,” which was created by Campus Crusade founder Bill Bright back in the 60’s. 

Charles had the whole thing memorized.

He used the whiteboard to scrawl out bible verses from the Book of Romans.

He drew images to show how our sin will send us straight to hell – and also how God’s grace builds a bridge to heaven for those who make a decision for Christ, whose death on the cross makes us clean.

None of our friends bought that bridge.

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A Wilder Way

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A Wilder Way: Midwifing the World to Come in an Age of Extinction is a five-day gathering at Dreaming Stone Arts and Ecology Center, August 19 – 23. Together, we will weave skill-shares, song circles, storytelling, faith narratives, and community ritual – all in service to intimacy with the land and community resilience.  There will be plenty of space for rest, reflection, informal connection, and time with (and in!) the river. Meals will weave abundant connections, integrating foraged ingredients with locally grown, storied food. Together we will experiment in creating a new/old bioregional culture attuning to the land, our bodies, the collective, and sacred presence.

Sign up early to get early bird discounts. Work-trade opportunities, partial scholarships, and payment plans are available to make each event accessible. This event will nourish your spirit, grow your skills, and widen your community.  Learn more at – https://dreamingstone.org/wilder-way/